Liberty and Power

by Sheldon Richman

Virtually all commentary about the influx of unaccompanied Central American children into the United States, which some say could rise to 90,000 this year, misses the point: no government has the moral authority to capture these kids and send them back to the miserable situations they have escaped.

by Sheldon Richman

If libertarians want to change how nonlibertarians’ think about government, they will need to understand how nonlibertarians think about government. By “nonlibertarians,” I mean the majority of people who spend little if any time pondering political theory, or what Murray Rothbard called political ethics. They may focus at times on particular government programs and actions, or on proposals for new programs, but rarely about government as an institution.

by Sheldon Richman

With wars raging in the Middle East, it seems like a good time to revisit a classic work by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), the economist, historian, and political philosopher who had a lot to do with the birth and evolution of the modern libertarian movement. His “War, Peace, and the State” is something that all peace advocates — not just self-conscious libertarians — ought to be familiar with.

by Sheldon Richman

It doesn’t take much to be smeared as an isolationist by leading Republicans. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who appears to be running for president again, and former vice president Dick Cheney — not to mention Sen. John McCain, Gov. Chris Christie, and other members of the GOP establishment — can always be counted on to drag out that insult whenever they sense a threat from anyone not as hawkish as they are. Let’s be clear: Someone who simply doesn’t want Americans draw into foreign conflicts is not an isolationist.

by Phillip Magness

Some days back I offered an interpretation
of the motives and political economy behind the adoption of the 16th
Amendment, noting at the time that it also caused extreme constitutional
havoc by altering the relationship between the tariff system and the
generation of federal tax revenue. While it is certainly possible to
read this as a statement of political aversion to the modern income tax
system, my characterization was actually an intended reference to
certain very specific constitutional consequences of the income tax
amendment that actually have little to do with any personal preferences
regarding the validity of progressive income taxation.

by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

Alex Tabarrok has a very flattering post at Marginal Revolution about my 2011 article, “Ben Bernanke versus Milton Friedman: The Federal Reserve’s Emergence as the U.S. Economy’s Central Planner." It seems that the President of the Richmond Fed has independently just made a similar argument. (Update: broken link fixed.)

by Sheldon Richman

The murders of the Israeli teens were atrocities, of course, but they
can in no way justify, retroactively or prospectively, the systematic
violence perpetrated against Palestinians that the state of Israel
constitutes at its core.

by Robert Higgs

Insofar as mainstream economics may be said to make moral-philosophical
assumptions, it rests overwhelmingly on a consequentialist-utilitarian
foundation. When mainstream economists say that an action is worthwhile,
they mean that it is expected to give rise to benefits whose total
value exceeds its total cost (that is, the most valued benefit
necessarily forgone by virtue of this particular action’s being taken).
But nearly always the economists make no attempt to evaluate as part of
their benefit-cost calculus any costs that might be incurred as a result
of how and by whom the action is taken.

by Phillip Magness

by Wendy McElroy

The Power of the Powerless was written in the wake of the "Prague Spring" (1968) during which Czechoslovakia liberalized freedom of speech and freedom of travel. The Soviet Union responded with brutal force that crushed the flicker of liberty. Havel was targeted for his prominent role in the reach for Czech independence. Arrested and imprisoned, he achieved an epiphany: the most powerful weapon against guns was the truth. The Power of the Powerless was a blistering attack on the communist regime. It was also a call for individuals to understand their own power not merely when they dissent but also when they comply with a system that is a lie.

by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

Ed Lazear had an outstanding op-ed, "Government Dries Up California's Water Supply," in the June 26 Wall Street Journal. It brings me back to 1982, when I first moved to California from Texas. Less Antman had the California Libertarian Party hire me as research director, and one of the biggest political issues at the time was water. The fight was over a ballot initiative authorizing construction of a Peripheral Canal around the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta to divert more water to Central Valley farmers and southern California. It would have been an enormous, expensive boondoggle that united environmentalist and libertarians in opposition. I ended up not only writing but speaking before all sorts of audiences about the issue. My studies made me quite familiar with the socialist bureaucracy, much of unelected with taxing power, which manages California's feudalistic water system, severely mispricing and misallocating water.

by Wendy McElroy

There is supposed to be bipartisan support for amending the federal criminal code so that tens of thousands of non-violent criminals do not rot in prison at taxpayers' expense. Among the "criminals" often mentioned are those convicted of possessing or selling marijuana, which is widely viewed as less harmful than legal substances such as alcohol or tobacco.

Is the Obama administration sincere in its stated intention to ease draconian drug sentences? Or is the rhetoric just that?

by Jonathan J. Bean

July 2 marks the 50th anniversary of the most famous Civil
Rights Act in U.S history. Passed after the longest debate in
congressional history, the Civil Rights Act (CRA) promised to secure
justice for all regardless of race, color, creed, sex, or national
origin. As I wrote in Race and Liberty: The Essential Reader,
the law “was understood to mean ‘colorblindness’ by nearly every
observer at the time.” The plain meaning of the act might be summed up
as: “Nondiscrimination. Period.”

by Sheldon Richman

Largely overshadowed by events in Iraq and Syria, the Obama
administration is dropping its pretense at displeasure with the military
junta in Egypt and restoring full support for the regime that so
recently quashed the country’s faltering attempt at democracy.

by Sheldon Richman

From 1898 to 1931, Smedley Darlington Butler was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. By the time he retired he had achieved what was then the corps’s highest rank, major general, and by the time he died in 1940, at 58, he had more decorations, including two medals of honor, than any other Marine. He published a short book with the now-famous title War Is a Racket, for which he is best known today. Butler opened the book with these words:

by David T. Beito

As part of my research on another topic, I happened across some rather provocative correspondence from Lawrence
Veiller. After the turn of the century,Veiller was the most significant national leader in the progressive tenement
reform. New York’s Tenement Law of 1901 was largely his brainchild and became a model of similar legislation
nationwide. He often worked closely with such luminaries as Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, and Theodore Roosevelt. Through groups such as the National Housing Association (which he headed) and the National Conference on Planning (in which
he served as an officer), Veiller was relentless in pushing for tougher building courts, limits on density, zoning, and other housing regulation.

As the correspondence shows, he was also a zealous advocate of sterilization laws. Veiller felt emboldened to act in his own state after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell (1927 upholding the constitutionality of sterilization laws In 1929, he persuaded the Committee on Criminal Courts of the Charity Organization Society of New York to endorse state legislation “providing for the sexual sterilization of insane, idiotic imbecilic, epileptic and feeble-minded inmates of certain state institutions.” As part of this effort he called for a “united front” of social workers to assemble in Albany to press for enactment. Apparently, however, Veiller was never able to persuade the Charity Organize Society as a whole to back a law and it was never enacted. One obstacle was Lawrence Purdy, a fellow official in the COS, who expressed his reluctance to Veiller: “Even if the law were so stringent that it would result in operations on a considerable number of people, the number would still be very small and I should myself have grave doubts concerning a law that was strong enough to be at all effective.”

by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

James Surowiecki had an excellent article in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker about countries committing intellectual piracy. It includes a nice summary of how "stealing" patented ideas played a major role in the early economic development of the United States. In the process, it surveys some of the considerable historical evidence debunking the widespread myth that intellectual property is necessary for, or even makes a contribution to, economic growth.